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Have any of you guys considered the possibility that North Korea might be controlled opposition? It's an interesting hypothesis that I've pondered on for a bit.

The U.S. MIC seems to always have to have a boogie man. The resurgent NK threat popped up just as ISIS (which is Al Qaeda with a name change) was fading into the past as the previous boogie man, and before that it was Saddam Hussein, and before that it was Al Qaeda again and before that the USSR and on and on to justify 222 years of war for a Republic that is only 239 years old.

How do you justify a 1 trillion 100 billion dollar military/security complex budget without a boogieman? If you've ever worked for a corporation and seen areas of the business trying to justify their existence, you can see how this line of thought might be playing itself out on a ginormous geopolitical scale. Prove you're necessary or lose funding, bottom line.

For a third world s#it hole with zero resources and trade embargoes up the wazoo, they sure have ramped up fast. They completed the Manhatten project AND, now out of the blue have missiles with the capability of hitting any target on the globe. Wasn't it just like 6 months ago where they were all blowing up on the launch pad? I don't know, it's kind of hard to buy.

That's another aspect of it. Scare the britches off of the Americans to keep the tax dollars flowing in, AND sell weapon systems to your allies who's citizens are also scared. It felt like Tump's last Asian tour was a MIC sales conference with that retarded twitter war raging the whole time to keep the pressure escalated.

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For a third world s#it hole with zero resources and trade embargoes up the wazoo, they sure have ramped up fast. They completed the Manhatten project AND, now out of the blue have missiles with the capability of hitting any target on the globe. Wasn't it just like 6 months ago where they were all blowing up on the launch pad? I don't know, it's kind of hard to buy.

They got some good rocket engines from Ukraine. They do not have the technology or the industrial capability to make their own engines. We know exactly how many engines they have. Only one shipment got through. That source has been shut down.

So I agree. This is all theater. Once those engines are used up, there are no more missiles. Not as scary as it looks.

calculate that range again. It is reported to say that the distance capability of newly launched NK ICBM is 13500 km. That pretty much covers all the way south to entire Chile inclusive. However, Kim Jong Un's target is entire East Coast of USoA.
And not too interested in South America for now.

nikotromus wrote:
For a third world s#it hole with zero resources and trade embargoes up the wazoo, they sure have ramped up fast. They completed the Manhatten project AND, now out of the blue have missiles with the capability of hitting any target on the globe. Wasn't it just like 6 months ago where they were all blowing up on the launch pad? I don't know, it's kind of hard to buy.
[/quote]

Ha,ha,haa a quantum leap in technology from 6 months ago. Behind every crime scene, there is a woman, er, Putin's war machine. When Ukraiina took a dump, all rocket engines there all sent back to Russia, then NK regime came asking for those technology transfer and the Russians agreed plus sent experts to NK in order to teach them.

President Trump accepts invitation from North Korea's chubby kid to discuss possible peace talk. When that happened, just booted Tillerson was far away elsewhere doin' business.

President Donald Trump’s firing of his top diplomat raises the stakes even further for his proposed summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

In the months before his ouster, Rex Tillerson bumped heads with the president over whether to talk to North Korea -- and wasn’t consulted before Trump agreed to meet Kim. Mike Pompeo, the hawkish CIA chief nominated to replace him as secretary of state, has defended Trump’s snap decision on the talks.

The stakes are incredibly high for any Trump-Kim meeting, which would be the first for a sitting U.S. president. The meeting may go well, and set the stage for further talks. Or the leaders may clash and revert to threats to annihilate each other’s country.

While Tillerson already appeared on the outer before his firing, Pompeo could amplify Trump’s desire to rely on his own instincts, and that’s a concern for North Korea watchers. Along with Defense Secretary James Mattis, Tillerson served as a voice for moderation as Trump repeatedly warned of military action to stop Kim’s nuclear weapons development.

A meeting with Kim would be a complex negotiation in which “you need to know the last step before you take the first one,” said John Park, director of the Korea Working Group at Harvard Kennedy School. “Those years of on-and-off negotiations were like climbing peaks and then sliding down the other side,” Park said. “The announced Trump-Kim meeting in May is a very high peak. If it fails, we crash.”

Trump cancels nuclear summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un ... I had somewhat a vague expectation for US~North Korea possible denuclearization summit to take place in Singapore early next month but....as expected Kim Jong Un under the guidance of Xi Jinpin playing
with Trump apparently...
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President Trump on Thursday canceled a planned summit next month with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, citing “tremendous anger and open hostility” from the rogue nation in a letter explaining his abrupt decision.
“I feel it is inappropriate, at this time, to have this long-planned meeting,” Trump said to Kim in a letter released by the White House on Thursday morning.

Today’s most popular stories on The Washington Post The summit — which had the potential to be a major diplomatic victory for Trump — had been planned for June 12 in Singapore.
South Korea’s government seemed blindsided by Trump’s announcement.
“We are attempting to make sense of what, precisely, President Trump means,” said government spokesman Kim Eui-kyeom.
Shortly before midnight in Seoul, South Korea’s president called an emergency meeting to discuss Trump’s decision, summoning his chief of staff, national security adviser, foreign minister, unification minister and intelligence chief to the presidential Blue House.
In his letter, Trump held open the possibility that the two leaders could meet at a later date to discuss denuclearization of the Korean peninsula, which Trump has been pushing.

The decision came amid hostile warnings from North Korea in recent days that it was reconsidering participation, including a statement that the United States must decide whether to “meet us in a meeting room or encounter us at [a] nuclear-to-nuclear showdown.”
A close aide to Kim unleashed a torrent of invective against the Trump administration Thursday morning, calling Vice President Pence a “political dummy” for remarks he made Monday in a television interview that made reference to the downfall of the late Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi.
North Korea has bristled at Trump administration suggestions that it follow the “Libyan model” to abandon its nuclear efforts. Gaddafi was killed in 2011 during anti-government chaos.
“I was very much looking forward to being there with you,” Trump said in his letter to Kim. “The world, and North Korea in particular, has lost a great opportunity for lasting peace and great prosperity and wealth.”
White House aides had grown concerned because North Korea had not responded to planning requests on the summit and had canceled a logistics meeting, said a senior White House official, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about the sensitive issue.
Many details needed to be settled within days for the summit to happen, this official said, adding that the White House did not want an embarrassing situation of “losing the upper hand.”
U.S. officials had begun signaling to other countries late last week that the summit could be postponed, and they appeared concerned that the meeting would not yield a clear result, said a foreign diplomat familiar with preparations.
A former senior U.S. official familiar with aspects of the planning said the two sides had not yet agreed on a draft communique, the usually bland statement issued at the close of diplomatic summits. The statement is typically worked out far in advance, and the absence of that draft had been a red flag to diplomats over the past week, the official said.
The dramatic announcement immediately reverberated on Capitol Hill. At the outset of a budget hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo read Trump’s letter.
In reaction to the cancelled summit, Sen. Bob Menendez (N.J.), the top Democrat on the committee, admonished the Trump administration for a “lack of deep preparation.”
“It’s pretty amazing that the administration might be shocked that North Korea is acting as North Korea might normally act,” he said.
Menendez also questioned why U.S. officials repeatedly raised the prospect of the “Libya model” as a roadmap for denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.
“I’m not sure that constantly quoting the Libya model is the diplomatic way to try to get to the results that we try to seek in North Korea,” he said.
Pompeo objected to Menendez’s characterization of a lack of planning, saying the U.S. negotiation team was “fully prepared.”
“We were fully engaged over the past weeks to prepare for this meeting,” he said.
In explaining the summit’s demise, Pompeo noted that in recent days, there was a breakdown in communication between the U.S. and North Korean preparation teams. On Tuesday, The Washington Post reported that North Koreans missed a scheduled meeting in Singapore last week between the preparation teams.
Pompeo said he hopes to restart conversations with the North Koreans and get the talks “back on track.” He expressed hope that Congress and the executive branch would work together to ramp up economic pressure on the isolated regime.

Trump had his “eyes wide open throughout the process,” said Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.). “He made the right choice” because Kim walked away from his commitment to denuclearize, Gardner said.
In a statement after Trump’s announcement, House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) said it was important for the United States to maintain pressure on North Korea through economic sanctions.
“We must continue to work with our allies toward a peaceful resolution, but that will require a much greater degree of seriousness from the Kim regime,” Ryan said. “At the same time, Congress has provided significant tools to hold North Korea accountable, and it is important that the United States not relent in this maximum pressure campaign.”
Even amid the heightened rhetoric, there were signs Thursday that North Korea continued to be interested in a summit.
North Korea claimed to have destroyed its nuclear testing site Thursday, setting off a series of explosions to collapse a network of underground tunnels where it had detonated six increasingly large bombs over 11 years.
The North set off a series of made-for-TV blasts that were reported by journalists brought to the site. But the Kim regime did not allow any experts to observe the events, making it difficult to assess what exactly they had done. Most analysts remain highly doubtful that North Korea is actually prepared to give up its nuclear program.
RELATED: North Korea declares its nuclear test site disabled hours before Trump cancels summit
In his letter, Trump also referenced what was widely interpreted at the time as another positive gesture from Kim: the release of three American prisoners into the custody of Pompeo during his visit to North Korea earlier this month.
“Someday, I look very much forward to meeting you,” Trump wrote. “In the meantime, I want to thank you for the release of the hostages who are now home with their families. That was a beautiful gesture and was very much appreciated.”
As recently as Wednesday, Trump did not tip his hand that he intended to cancel the meeting with Kim.
During a television interview that was taped Wednesday and aired Thursday morning, he said he might accept a “phase-in” of North Korea’s denuclearization.
“We’re going to see. I’d like to have it done immediately,” Trump said on “Fox & Friends” on Fox News. “But, you know, physically, a phase-in may be a little bit necessary, we will have to do a rapid phase-in, but I’d like to see it done at one time.”
Trump had sounded cautionary notes about the prospect that the summit would be delayed or canceled. But he had also heralded the possibility for it leading to lasting peace on the Korean Peninsula and embraced suggestions — made by South Korea President Moon Jae In and others — that he would be worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize.
Asked about that prospect by a reporter just two weeks ago, Trump responded: “Everyone thinks so, but I would never say it.”

I actually think this is a smart move by Trump. There is a lot in the press about his inability to focus on summit prep (like most everything else), and it has been clear for some time that the admin did not have a clear idea of what it was looking for except a vague notion of denuclearization (which clearly meant something else to the N Koreans). He has put so much political capital into a successful outcome (the calls for a Nobel prize, distraction from the weakness of the Republicans going into the November elections), and the bargaining positions of the two were so far apart, that the best he could have gotten out of a summit was a vague agreement to keep negotiating. As flawed as the past agreements with the N Koreans have been, they were much more specific than anything that Trump could have gotten in Singapore. In this sense he has cut his political losses before they continued to grow. That letter, though, was classic Trump.

I somewhat coming into agreement with Trumpster on : Xi Jinping is advising the chubby kid in how to steer the pot before once presumed Singapore summit. It was when Xi Jinping came to know that Kim Jong Un wanted to establish the talk with Trump then PRC felt possible danger if this meeting to take place. Xi Jinping never cared much for the young leader of NK thus he did not establish any sort of communication with the just borne young dictator for last 7 years. But when he saw that Trump~Kim jung Un meeting in Singapore announced he in a fluster approached the kid to offering him all kind of help! So all these shown reversal of attitude from NK, as Trmpster says, Xi Jinping is steering the shit behind the chubby kid..